The first answer to the
question of whether post-apocalyptic fiction is comedy or tragedy seems all too
obvious. The sheer number of horrific events, losses, causalities, and trials
faced by the characters after the apocalyptic event insists that we are dealing
with a tragic form here. The last dying gasps of our world are meted out by the
survivors, each one a sign that things in the present, our present, went
terribly, terribly wrong. Perhaps a more suitable way to grasp the question is
to return to the birth of the modern form of the comedy, (i.e. the romantic
comedy), which happens to arrive on the scene at a crucial moment in the
pre-history of post-apocalyptic fiction as well.

The comparison I am asking us
to consider is, for all intents and purposes, actually between Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
This is where the question of comedy clarifies its place in my inquiry. But first
a word on Shelley’s science fiction novel: Frankenstein
enacts one version of tragedy, when, in the face of a possible resolution
to the conflict of the narrative the monster asks Frankenstein to fashion him a
wife, Frankenstein refuses, shattering any hope that a resolution can be met.
The novel is obviously much more complex than this, but it illustrates the
dynamic of the tragic closure, which is made unbearable by the possibility of a
complete resolution, if only for an instant, seeming to be so close at hand and
then being dashed away.

Pride
and Prejudice, on the other hand, incorporates many minor
tragedies time and again into its narrative form, bringing Elizabeth and Darcy
close together and then pulling them apart. But in Austin’s case the
bittersweet sting of a nearly fulfilled love is finally overwhelmed by
understanding, union, and marriage. Phillip Wegner has commented that the insidious
nature of Austin’s text is that, beneath the veneer of love and the hustle and
bustle of posturing and relationships, is the work of the bourgeois Cultural
Revolution, which at this point in history, was engaged in an occluded struggle
to make marriage a natural conclusion and the only direction in which one ought
to move.

My argument, then, about post-apocalyptic
fiction hinges on its own mode of closure. What is often the case at the end of
these novels, rather than marriage or the failed reconciliation of opposing
forces, is the overwhelming prescience of the family or an insistence on its
importance. To name a few examples Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), Alan DeNiro’s Total Oblivion, More or Less (2009), Peter
Heller’s The Dog Stars(2012),Cormac McCarthy’s The Road(2006), and so on. To quote the ending of DeNiro’s novel: “I
understand love a little bit more—and what it can cost. But it’s a cost I’m
more willing to pay. Mother taught me that. Ciaran taught me that. My living
breathing family is still teaching me that. I don’t pretend to be wise anymore,
and I don’t try to stop being afraid when I’m afraid, or angry when I’m angry. It
sounds so easy but it’s the hardest things in the world” (306). So, in terms of
closure, it is safe to say post-apocalyptic fiction is comedic.

What’s at stake in all of this,
besides some musings on literary history and generic form? The stakes for me
are simply this, the work of Austin marks a moment when the operations of the
novel, in hindsight, did the work of solidifying a class and outlining that
class’s role in history. The marriage at the end of Austin’s novels isn’t the deepest
moment of cultural warfare, however, I would argue that moment comes after the novel’s close and that its
name is the reproduction of daily life under capital. Isn’t then the form of
closure we find in much contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction engaged in the
same type of warfare? Though we can argue about the role of literature and the
death of the novel (about which see more here), I think it’s clear that
post-apocalyptic fiction is doing a similar kind of work to Austin’s novels in
that it tries to maintain the status quo and is deeply disinterested in the movement of history as such, which isn’t the
same as saying it cannot tell us anything about history.